


Leave You For Dead

by Siamesa



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Gen, Not A Fix-It, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-02
Updated: 2016-05-02
Packaged: 2018-06-06 00:00:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6728578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siamesa/pseuds/Siamesa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sansa awakens, a scarless child at the Red Keep, surrounded by the faces of the dead.</p><p>This may be Hell.  This may be a chance to change the future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leave You For Dead

**Author's Note:**

> You were sharp as a knife to get me.  
> You were a wolf in the night to fetch me back.  
> The wishes I’ve made are too vicious to tell.  
> Everyone knows I am going to hell…
> 
> And if it’s true,  
> I’ll go there with you.
> 
> Wolf, by Phildel.  
> -  
> Trigger Warning: Allusions to sexual abuse.

She kills Petyr first.

She sits, in her too-small body, wringing her soft clean hands, watching his throat as he swallows the wine.  And it’s easy.

It’s easy to begin to scream, to cry, to be utterly useless as castle men and Stark men stream into the room.

“We were just talking – we were talking and we were eating and he – “

A man, a Winterfell man, with a face she can only vaguely put a name to, reaches for her, tries to turn her away.  Precious little Sansa Stark has never seen a dying man.

(“Why would I need so many guards, father?  Lord Baelish would never harm me.”

“You’re the Prince’s betrothed, Sansa.  And things are different in the South.”)

But she watches, anyway, under his arm.  Watches Petyr spit blood on to his gold and silks, watches him claw at his chest until his doublet rips, and keep clawing, sharp nails on bare skin.

She owes him that much, she thinks.  He made her into what she is.  The tears come more easily than she would have thought.

Finally, the twitching stops.

“Is he –“ And she fakes a swoon.  The guards carry her gently into the hall, put her on her feet.  Take her to her father.

-

It had been terrifying to awaken like this.  A child’s body, unscarred, and red walls all around her.  She’d stared at her hands, and gasped, and seen Jeyne Poole, and nearly screamed.  Jeyne Poole, with bright eyes and all her face and fingers.

She’d said she was ill, because she was still enough of herself to lie.  She’d gathered her thoughts, and brushed her hair, and jabbed pins into her arm to see if she would awaken.  But it was the night before that felt more like a dream. 

_All around her the wail of men and dragons.  Blood freezing her face to the snow. Jon, and his blue, blue eyes._

To be in the Red Keep, surrounded by the faces of the dead – this must be one of the Hells.  One picked and chosen, all for her, by the cruelest of the gods.

“Sansa?”

And then she cannot breathe.  She clutches her fists into her nightshirt.

“Septa Mordane said you were ill.”  Eddard Stark is silhouetted in the door.

“A headache,” she whispers, after too long a silence.  He’ll know she’s lying.  He’ll know she’s lying and –

Come sit, on the side of her bed.  _Her father._ She’d disowned him as a traitor, then been Alayne, then been Sansa again, and even after all of it, she thinks, she never reclaimed more than his ghost.  _My father._

She buries her head in his shoulder, and cries the tears of the child she isn’t.

_I am Sansa Stark, daughter of Lord Eddard and Lady Catelyn.  The blood of Winterfell._

_And I know what I must do._

-

But knowing and doing are such very different things. 

She knows the outlines, of what her father did in King’s Landing, of what he found and why he died.  Some of it is inference, some the truth in Petyr’s lies, some whispered to her by the Weirwood trees – but of it, the inference rules the day.

The hard facts, then, are these: the Queen is bedding her brother, the Royal children are their bastards, and Petyr Baelish cannot be trusted.  Somewhere to the North, her mother is with Tyrion Lannister, time ticking until the war begins.  There are other things, too, useful but useless: Lady Lysa killed Jon Arryn.  Ser Jaime’s not the only one in Cersei’s bed.  Daenerys Targaryen will hatch three dragons.

None of these are things that sweet little Sansa Stark ought to know.  None of them are things that her father will believe – at least, not directly from her mouth.

But she had one advantage, and she’s had years of learning how to work it well.  Sweet little Sansa Stark is still utterly beneath suspicion.

-

She spends half an hour watching Joffrey at the training yard, cheering every victory as opponent after opponent takes a fall rather than risk injuring the prince.  He wears her favor roughly tied around one wrist, the silk barely touched by dust.

Cersei sometimes stares at her a little too long, as if she can tell what’s lurking behind Sansa’s eyes.  Joffrey barely looks at her at all.  She’s like his sword or his armor, now, taken for granted.  She does not shudder when he kisses her hand, but the first time, alone in her room, she scrubbed until the place on her knuckles his lips had touched was raw and red.  She thought she’d beaten back some of this anger.  She was wrong.

Her father comes to collect her, after a while, and she regales him with shallow reports on the action.

“And Joffrey is the handsomest man in King’s Landing,” she says.  “Though Jeyne says it’s Lord Renly.”

“Indeed?”

“Joffrey will be tall like Lord Renly, I think.”  She cocks her head to the side, and wonders if she’s overplaying it.  “I wonder how he’d look if they had the same hair.  Or blue eyes, like his father.  I think he’s handsomer golden, but I wouldn’t mind blue eyes.”  It’s crude, but subtlety has so far failed her.  The next time this conversation comes up, she may have to go as far as comparing him to Ser Jaime. 

“Perhaps,” says her father.  He’s suddenly worried.  Either Council meetings are going poorly, or she’s finally hit home.

-

She cultivates Lord Baelish.

She knows that it’s a risk.  It draws her father to him, too.  She knows very little about what they did together in Kings Landing, what they planned, and what little she has was gathered in fragments when both men were dead. 

Petyr is not as easy as Joffrey, but she knows him better.  She may know him better than any man alive.  She knows what flattery he’ll believe, what little slips of information he wants, how to wear her hair to look like Cat Tully at Riverrun.

(She’ll see her mother again, if she makes it through this.  She’ll see Mother and Robb, Rickon and Bran.)

“You’ll make Joffrey _jealous.”_

She isn’t sure what to do with Arya, and Arya isn’t sure what to do with her.  She can’t hug her little sister, can’t swear to protect her, but she also can’t bring herself to snipe back.  Arya, deprived of an opponent, avoids her even more than she already had.

“Ugh, Arya!  Lord Baelish is _old!_ ”  She gathers up her skirts in a huff.

He is old, at least to her, and she can scarcely remember ever being this young.  He still watches her, but only kisses the air over her fingers.  Mostly he just seems to want her to listen, to smile at him bright-eyed, and to drop occasional hints of secrets overheard.  She has to watch her tongue carefully, but she remembers that, and it grounds her.  She knows how to be Alayne.

She cultivates other things, too.  She and Jeyne gather flowers, from the garden and the godswood, and decorate the Tower of the Hand, replacing every bouquet as it withers.  She knows their names.  She knows petals, and roots, and what they can do to a man if he finds them in his drink.

She just does not know yet, who she will kill.

-

She thinks her father is making progress.  He is busy and grim, doubling and then tripling their guards.  Palace men mix with those from Winterfell, and Sansa shudders.  Her father is the best man she knows, but she can see so easily how he died.  Good men can’t survive without a monster like her in their shadow.

Mother.  Bran.  And now time is ticking towards something she _does_ know.  The night her father might have run, and lived.  The night that she betrayed him.

And suddenly she wonders what she is trying to do.

Does she want to save the kingdom?  Does she want to kill Joffrey, Cersei, Lord Tywin, the never-ending list of men who murdered House Stark?  Or does she simply want to go home?

She could run to Cersei, as great a mistake as it was.  She could kill Joffrey.  She could get her father’s secret into the right hands.  What then?  What use would it be to have Stannis, Renly, Tommen, even Robert on the throne, when winter came?

How many lives would she save, just by keeping a Stark in Winterfell?  Let Robert hate him.  Let Joffrey sulk and prance.  Lord Eddard would believe the Night’s Watch.  Winterfell would still stand to face the Others.

Jeyne finds her shaking, staring at her hands.  For a moment, they are cold and black with frostbite – and then Jeyne’s warm fingers are around her own.

“Sansa?”

“Just a nightmare,” she says.  It’s early afternoon.  “Help me get ready to go see Lord Baelish.”

-

She does not run to Cersei.  She does not run to anyone.  Ladies and maids come to tell her how brave she was, how frightening it must have been, to see Lord Baelish die _._ Some say his heart, and some say poison.  Sansa shivers at all the appropriate times.

She packs cautiously, and tells everyone else to do the same.  Three dozen people can’t keep a secret, but it’s all chaos now, and they’ll have time.

She’ll go home.

Arya scowls, but Sansa keeps her head high.  She barely has it in her to pretend she’s torn over Joffrey, and there’s something in her father’s eyes, now, as he looks at her. 

“Are you all right, Sansa?”

“I’m – I’m well, father.”  She squeezes her eyes shut, as though to hide tears.  “I’ll marry someone, won’t I?  Someone … someone kinder.”  The last words are a whisper.

Her father hugs her, and she blinks into his tunic.  “Aye.  You will.  The best lord in all Seven Kingdoms.”

She’s been considering her marriage.  Willas Tyrell is likely the best option, but it takes her far from the North.  Lord Umber and Lord Karstark ought to still have unmarried heirs.  There’s even Sweetrobin, or Renly Baratheon.  She just needs to know which direction to push.

They head for the docks in separate carts.  Sansa has Jeyne to one side, Arya to the other, both of them quiet.  She sees mule’s ears ahead of her in the dusk, and thinks of Mya, then of Randa.  Petyr’s hands, clawing and twitching.  The deaths of dragons.

A sudden stop awakens her.  Vayon Poole lifts first Jeyne, then her onto the docks.  There’s a ship ahead, low and lovely, her figurehead a merman. 

“No!”

It’s Arya.

“You said you were coming with us!”

Sansa’s blood runs cold.

Arya is clinging to their father’s hands.  “You can’t stay!  People want to kill you!”

“I’ll be safe, Arya.”  She’d forgotten her father knew how to lie like that.

“You won’t!” she says.  Too desperate.  She sounds like the child whose body she wears.  “Father, you won’t!  The Queen will kill you, and Joffrey will, and they’ll promise you mercy but –“

“Sansa.”  Her father has taken one hand out of Arya’s grasp to touch her shoulder.  “I have my duty.”

“ _No._ ”

But this she cannot fight.  She can lie, she can hide, she can even kill.  She can be every bit the monster Joffrey and Petyr made her, every bit the woman who stood at the end of the world.  But she cannot tear her father from his honor.

Not even death had done that.

She can give him nothing.  The future ahead is blank and empty.  Petyr is gone, and perhaps that will be enough.  Perhaps it will only set darker plans in motion.

Sansa stands on the stern of the ship, watching her father until the night swallows him.  It is then, only then, that she begins to weep.


End file.
